Earlier this month, we highlighted The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics. Featuring films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles and Fellini, this master list came together in 2012 when Sight & Sound(the cinema journal of the British Film Institute) asked contemporary critics and directors to name their 12 favorite movies. Nearly 900 cinephiles responded, and, from those submissions, a meta list of 10 was culled.

So how about something similar for books, you ask? For that, we can look back to 2007, when J. Peder Zane, the book editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, asked 125 top writers to name their favorite books — writers like Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Michael Chabon. The lists were all compiled in an edited collection, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and then prefaced by one uber list, “The Top Top Ten.” Continue reading →

Books

Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Reality has always attracted me like a magnet’

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Svetlana Alexievich. The Belarusian writer and investigative journalist is lauded for her unique, and often harrowing, insights into life behind the Iron Curtain.

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Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Literature Prize

If there ever was a stark manifesto of intent, it came with Svetlana Alexievich’s debut novel “War’s Unwomanly Face.” Released in 1985 and set during World War II, the novel ties together a series of moving and often stark monologues on the brutality and hopelessness of war – all told by women and children. Alexievich made no illusions: she was going to toe no one else’s line.

For those new to Alexievich’s work, the Swedish Academy said Thursday after announcing that she’d been selected for this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, that “War’s Unwomanly Face” was the one to start with. The innovative writer has “mapped the soul” of the Soviet and post-Soviet people, said the Academy.

First-hand account of Soviet Union’s disintegration

It’s this audacious determination to tell such brutally real stories that had Alexievich on the run for a decade. She was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Stanislav – now the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, in the country’s central-eastern Continue reading →

Dr. Thomas Prymak has just published a new book “Gathering a Heritage: Ukrainian, Slavonic and Ethnic Canada and the USA.”

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the study of immigration and ethnicity has grown to become an essential aspect of North American history. In Gathering a Heritage, Thomas M. Prymak uses the essays and articles he has written over the past thirty years as a historian of Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian history to Continue reading →